Caroline Calloway: Unexemplary Exonian

If you follow Exeter alumni or keep track of Instagram influencers, or even if you don’t, you’ve probably heard of Caroline Calloway. An Exeter alum, Calloway rose to fame on Instagram documenting her life as a student at the University of Cambridge. Her witty and uniquely long captions, combined with her aesthetically pleasing photos, garnered her thousands of followers and a book deal. However, a recent article published by The Cut alleges that Calloway’s Instagram captions, along with the brand that Calloway created through her posts, was all created by a woman named Natalie Beach, Calloway’s aide de camp. No need to worry, though—if you’re confused by all of this, you’re not alone.Influencer culture is a very modern phenomenon. With the advent of social media and the rise of Instagram, people have been able to provide others with a window into their own lives in a way never seen before. Personal privacy has become a thing of the past, and some see this as an opportunity—you could showcase their life to others while making money. Caroline Calloway is one of those people. She engineered her Instagram posts so that the people who followed her would think of her as an adventurous, freewheeling girl who wants to see the world. So even if you can’t go to, say, Barcelona, you could follow Calloway on Instagram and she would post pictures of herself around the city, allowing you to feel like you’re there with her. This is the baseline concept of an Instagram influencer: someone who uses their position to project an image of how they think you should live, whose followers diligently pay attention to the gospel that the person preaches. If the influencer says that you should buy chairs made out of hand-fashioned oak wood because it helps the environment, you can bet that influencer’s followers will run to their nearest furniture store and ask about oak chairs. This makes influencer culture a terrifying concept. You’re literally signing over your free will to an influencer whether you are aware of it or not, so that they can dictate how your life is supposed to be like. And we’re completely desensitized to this. However, the influencer lifestyle has a short shelf life. According to Beach, Calloway’s agent Byrd Leavell (who also represented high-profile names as Chelsea Handler, Tiffany Haddish and Donald Trump) acquired her many opportunities, none of which came to fruition. Her book deal fell through, and a “Creativity Workshop,” which, with a $165 entrance fee and failure to deliver on promises like mason jar gardens, was billed as the next Fyre Fest, Billy McFarland’s fraudulent “luxury music festival.”So what went wrong? The article written by Beach is hard to corroborate, partially because most of the information she wrote about was acquired from one-on-one conversations between her and Calloway, and partially because nobody wants to spend valuable time fact-checking sources for a story about an Instagram influencer. After all, to many, “influencer” doesn’t even count as a real job. So why do we place such importance on these people whom most of us have never met? The basic answer lies in the foundation of social media. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. were all founded on the premise of greater connectivity amongst people. We can make more friends, and more easily keep in touch with old acquaintances. It plays on very basic human desires and fears. Specifically, social media is a supposed cure for the human fear of loneliness, because if you’re on Instagram, you’re never alone. Influencers manipulate that fear. They know that people want company, and they provide that. Whether they instruct you in fitness, tell you how to use a new makeup palette, or show you the new RV they bought, influencers know that their followers desperately want to be them, and they frame their posts to make their lives more appealing. By doing so, they can attract even more followers, and ensure that they keep the ones they already have. Even followers, though, are a means to an end. If you’re popular, people will give you more opportunities. From a company’s viewpoint, it’s a waste of time to spend money making advertisements if you can whip up some sort of a deal with an influencer, who will convince their thousands of followers to buy your product. Caroline Calloway’s story is much like this. The only reason she got her book deal, according to Beach, was because she was already popular on Instagram. The most worrying part of this? According to Beach, Calloway only ever became famous because, in accordance with her desire to have a book deal, she met with professional writers who helped her to post ads on Instagram. These ads made it seem as though Calloway had followers, and so people flocked to her page.                                                                                             Of course, Beach might be lying. Again, there’s no way to corroborate the information. But the fact that this story could possibly be true should speak to how much we’ve let influencers get away with, because there are other stories of other influencers which have been proven true (see James Charles).You might be thinking, so what? They’re making a living, same as the rest of us. Or you might think, “Influencers are bad because they are useless members of society. They don’t contribute anything.” To both of those points, I say I agree. Being an influencer is a viable career choice, because influencers quite cleverly use their popularity and brand image to attract people to them, and reap the benefits of having a massive following. It’s the dictionary definition of “famous for being famous.” However, if influencer culture disappeared overnight, I doubt society would change drastically. I noted that the influencer’s image is what their fanbase wants to become. What this means is influencers survive by preying on people’s low self-esteem. In fact, if you look at this more broadly, this is what all of social media does. It might provide a platform for people to connect, but it also provides a platform for people to feel bad about themselves. The concept of likes and followers establishes a hierarchy of popularity. Instagram announced this year that they have started the process of removing likes, so that people won’t feel bad if someone else gets a much larger amount of likes. Yet this is completely the wrong way to go about it. The reason why people feel bad about themselves is not because of the amount of likes. It’s because the content itself reflects people’s fear that they aren’t living their best life. This is why people like Caroline Calloway are not only unnecessary, they could potentially be dangerous. Calloway profited off her followers’ anxieties without a second thought about her actions. This is influencer culture. This is what social media does to people.